Re: Comments on Nov-14 WD for ITS IG also Re: POWDER comments: multiple/alternate displaytext strings? (eg. different languages/scripts)

Yves, Dan,

Over the last week or so I've been working through all the comments 
we've received (again, double checking everything before we go to PR) 
and looked again at those you sent [1, 2], both of which relate to 
language/translation issues. I realised that there was more to do...

Initial lack of support for xml:lang was an omission. I've now 
implemented support for it in the relevant elements in the POWDER 
Processor I've been working on [3] and it's already supported in the 
other tools we have.

For example [4] shows you the output of a processor given a POWDER doc 
that makes it very plain that anything on example.com or example.org is 
red in multiple languages.

I've also amended the relevant documentation to make it clear that 
xml:lang attributes are appropriate for use on the displaytext, comment 
and label elements. See the change log at [5] for pointers to the 
relevant text.

Although xml:lang attributes may be added to tag elements, we don't 
recommend it for the reasons shown in the new section on localisation.

Regretfully, it does not appear to be possible to include the ITS tag 
set. This is because although POWDER is encoded in XML, it transports 
RDF and can be transformed into RDF/OWL. Therefore, although it looks 
like XML, one really has to think of POWDER as RDF which interprets XML 
attributes as datatype properties. This means that they can only appear 
in node elements and things like its:translate do not have the desired 
semantics within POWDER.

Therefore, unless there is a way to use ITS with RDF, we can't integrate 
it as Yves has suggested.

If you have any further comments, or if you disagree with our action 
here, do please let us know.

Thanks

Phil.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-powderwg/2008Dec/0046.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-powderwg/2009Jan/0020.html
[3] http://i-sieve.com/cgi-bin/processor.cgi
[4] http://tinyurl.com/c62tsn
[5] http://philarcher.org/powder/dr/20090203-diff.html#sincelc1


Yves Savourel wrote:
> Hi Phil,
> 
>> OK, now I'm being a little lazy - because I'm trying to 
>> expedite this ASAP and I admit to only having seen the 
>> ITS doc for the first time this afternoon. You've kindly 
>> sent us an ITS rules file - is the idea that every POWDER 
>> doc should link to this? Or at least, every POWDER doc 
>> that includes localised tags? Or should we embed the 
>> rules in the schema?
> 
> The idea is that the rules document is available to whoever needs to localize or preform some linguistic-related tasks on the
> document.
> 
> It is certainly not necessary to have the rules in every document instance.
> Including them in the schema could be a good way to make sure it's readily accessible.
> Or it could be a separate document (with a link to it in the spec). From the view point of the ITS processor it doesn't really
> matter.
> 
> -yves
> 
> 

-- 
Phil Archer
w. http://philarcher.org/

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 17:41:42 UTC